Under Santa Cruz Wharf, a robot watches for algal blooms

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An algae-photographing robot at the Santa Cruz Wharf has snapped shots of dozens of phytoplankton varieties, including some of the species responsible for harmful algal blooms. Pictured here is a sample of algae photographed at the wharf on Nov. 15. (Contributed — UCSC Kudela Lab)

SANTA CRUZ — Corpses of fish and seabirds wash up on beaches. Toxins build up in crabs and other shellfish, turning their meat into a health hazard. Businesses that rely on steady streams of seafood and tourists suffer millions of dollars in losses.

The culprit? Algal blooms.

The devastating effects of toxin-producing algae have been making headlines nationwide. In Florida this fall, toxic algal blooms became key election issues in the congressional and gubernatorial races. And California is hardly immune: The Golden State has suffered its share of harmful algae outbreaks in the past several years.

Now, a UC Santa Cruz research team has deployed algae-photographing robots to be on the lookout for the formation of algal blooms in the Monterey and San Francisco bays. It’s a promising new step for the California coastline, where crab fishers and feasters alike now routinely watch for news of season opening delays caused by algae-made domoic acid contamination.

Called Imaging FlowCytobots, the devices are manufactured by Massachusetts-based McLane Research Laboratories. One of the team’s robots has spent the better part of this year beneath the Santa Cruz Wharf.

The robot pulls in seawater from the bay and passes it in front of a laser beam. The laser acts like a tripwire that detects when phytoplankton — microscopic ocean algae that include the kinds of toxin-producing species responsible for harmful algal blooms — stream by. This prompts the robot to snap a black-and-white photo of each phytoplankton. The robot then sends all its photos wirelessly to the team’s lab on campus.

UCSC algae biologist Alexis Fischer then runs the photos through a computer program similar to facial recognition software. The program quickly identifies the algae species in the snapshots.

“We’re priming ourselves to have an early warning system” for algal blooms, she said.

During the 2015-16 Dungeness crab season, a massive toxic algal bloom associated with the “Blob” of warm water in the northern Pacific postponed the Central Coast’s commercial Dungeness crab season from November to March.

For commercial fishermen, such delays often result in an intense struggle to make ends meet.

“It’s devastating,” said Hans Havemann, co-owner of H&H Fresh Fish, a seafood supplier in Santa Cruz. “It’s getting to be a bigger and bigger deal all the time.”

The entire livelihoods of some California fishermen depend on being able to harvest the crabs, he said.

This year, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife delayed until mid-December or later the opening of the commercial Dungeness season north of Bodega Head in Sonoma County. Crabs harvested from those waters had high levels of domoic acid, a toxin produced by a type of marine algae called Pseudo-nitzschia.

Eating crabs and shellfish with high levels of domoic acid can cause a range of symptoms, including vomiting, diarrhea and headaches. In rare cases, eating tainted seafood may cause more severe symptoms or even death.

Earlier this month, Richard Diaz, 68, of San Jose, and Russ Tanner, 80, of Santa Clara, put out a crab pot and spent a day fishing for fun in the Año Nuevo area. But Diaz said the domoic acid in crabs is an increasing concern.

“I don’t want to eat it if it’s not healthy,” Diaz said after he and Tanner towed their boat out of the water at the Santa Cruz Harbor.

Domoic acid can build up in the meat and guts of crabs because algae make up the base of the oceans’ food chains. When there is a lot of toxin-producing algae compared to harmless algae species, the razor clams, oysters and other animals that eat algae will store more of the toxin in their bodies than usual. Dungeness crabs eat some of these shellfish and accumulate domoic acid in their own bodies.

In California, algal blooms harm more than our seafood. In 2007, an algal bloom in the Monterey Bay killed hundreds of birds by coating their feathers with a foam that ruined the natural water repellent that keeps birds dry and warm.

Algae researchers like Patricia Glibert of the University of Maryland believe Hurricane Irma in the summer of 2017 is partly to blame for the catastrophe.

Florida’s west coast sees a mild bloom of the same algae species almost every year, Glibert said. But Irma’s heavy rains washed more nutrient-rich water from land into the ocean, which likely boosted the bloom’s growth when it moved closer to shore this past summer.

Climate change might be affecting the severity of algal blooms by making storms stronger, larger or more common in some places, according to Glibert and other researchers. Warmer temperatures and other changes in Earth’s water might also adversely affect future blooms by throwing nature out of whack.

To protect Californians from some of the harmful effects of algal blooms, the state Department of Public Health regularly collects and tests seawater and shellfish samples. But the UCSC team believes the state can do more to be prepared.

The algae-photographing robots can check water for harmful algae species every 20 minutes — much more frequently than humans can manually collect and examine water samples. With the robots and the lab’s computer programs constantly identifying algae in the water, team members can warn state officials right away when they start seeing increases in toxic algae species.

Ten years ago, the same model of robot caught wind of a toxic algae outbreak just a week or two before an annual oyster festival in Texas attended by thousands of people. After health officials confirmed that toxic algae levels were too high, festival organizers shipped in oysters from Louisiana to avoid serving tainted Texas shellfish to festivalgoers.

“If they used Texas oysters, potentially 20,000 people could have gotten sick,” said Lisa Campbell, a Texas A&M University researcher who manages the robots on the Texas coast.

An early warning like this could have helped the Monterey Abalone Co. avoid an algal bloom disaster that hit its abalone in 2007. The phytoplankton responsible killed $60,000 worth of the company’s abalone by damaging their gills and using up oxygen in the seawater that the shellfish need to survive.

“If we saw it coming, we could have avoided great loss,” said Trevor Fay, co-owner of the company, who added that employees could have tried to save the abalone by moving them into clean water.

UCSC’s Fischer said the only downside of the robots is that the team can’t get enough of them.

The research team now has only three robots, split between the Monterey and San Francisco bays. The main reason is that each costs about $150,000, but Fischer is hopeful that the costs will go down as the robots become more popular among researchers.

“We want to have these robots all along the coast in California,” Fischer added.